Trivia Buffs, This Survey Is For You

August 6, 2001|By Todd J. Gillman, Dallas Morning News

WASHINGTON -- Finally, some fun stuff is starting to filter out from the Census Bureau.

The bureau has been releasing data for months showing the changing face of America. The nation's Hispanic growth spurt is well-documented. News magazines have run hand-wringing cover stories about the decline of the two-parent family.

But the latest data dump has some of the minutiae that demographers, marketers and trivia junkies have been awaiting. For instance:

Idaho has more people of Bulgarian ancestry than any other state. It also has the highest rate of marriage under age 20.

Hawaii has the most one-room housing units per capita; Utah, the most homes with at least nine rooms.

Roughly 2.5 million Americans commute more than 90 minutes to work. That's three hours round trip. Every day. .

In New York, nearly one-third of adults have never been married. Are New Yorkers too hard to be around, even for one another? Nah, said sociologist Frances Goldscheider, an expert on family structure at Brown University. "When they get married, they move to New Jersey," she said.

These factoids and more can be found, with enough computer savvy, in a new Census 2000 Supplementary Survey released today. The survey involved 700,000 households in 1,203 counties nationwide and was conducted at the same time as the once-a-decade census last year.

In the never-been-married data, California and Massachusetts are close behind New York with high rates of never-weds. All are meccas for single people, Goldscheider noted, with lots of universities and nightlife and such.

Of course, California also has the most people commuting three hours a day. Which could explain their inability to pair up -- or stay together once they do. The Golden State has 2.4 million divorcees, the most of any state by far. Texas ranks second, with about 1.6 million divorcees. Florida has 1.5 million.